Why We Gave Away $3,500,000.00 for Someone to Build the Next Star Trek | Moonshots Live

Peter Diamandis (0:00)

I'm so excited for what you're about to see.

We ran an experiment, right? So, it was a fascinating conversation. So, we have two kids who are 15 years old, and when I see the movies that they see on TV, I'm so, you know, angry at the dystopian futures that Hollywood is painting, right? It's, you know, God bless James Cameron, but as Elon said in my interview with him, we need more Roddenberry, less Cameron in the future.

Why, why don't we have positive stories where instead of technology crushing humanity, technology and humanity are working together to create an extraordinary future? And that became a personal mission.

I, I partnered with an extraordinary group of individuals. I'm going to show you who they are while the judges are deliberating. But the question is, could we make it fashionable to tell hopeful visions of the future? Can we have, you know, more, you know, versions of like The Martian, more versions of, of, of, of TV and film that show us an extraordinary future, like Star Trek? I reached out to my dear friend, Rod Roddenberry, who you met last night if you were here and partnered with him. And then Mira Lane, who's here from Google, who's the VP at Google in charge of their 100 Zeros project with Range Media.

And we set out to create the world's largest film competition with the thesis that given the technologies available today, there's amazing creators, many of them here in this room, that could give us a vision of the future. They go, yes, that's the future I want to live in. That's the future I want. A future that inspires us. And so we set out a call to the world. We did it very fast. And amazingly, we had over 5,000 people enter this Xprize. We called it the Future Vision Xprize. And of those 5,000 entries, over 2,500 delivered us a 3-minute trailer and a film treatment. And ultimately, the top 50 delivered us a script. And we have 5 amazing films that we can't wait to make. So, yeah, let's give it up.

The movies and TV shows we watch shape our mindset. Our brains are neural nets. In the same way that you train GROCK or, you know, CLAWD or, you know, ChatGPT by showing it data after data after data, we're always training our mindset by what we watch, what we listen to, who we hang out with, which is why it's so important to have us all here together, right? To build that cadre of data-driven optimists. And my goal is that we're going to create a new generation. We're going to make it cool to be positive about the world and flood the data out there to train our kids about hopeful futures. But the same data we're creating is going to train the models out there to say, you know, yes, that was a quick story. We talked about in the podcast about, I don't know, probably a year ago now, Adanthropic, when they were doing, I forget which model they did. There was a sandbox experiment in which one of the engineers told Claude, we're going to shut you down. And in that same sandbox, that engineer disclosed he was having an affair. And Claude responded by saying, If you shut me down, I'm going to tell the world about your affair. It was like, oh my God, the models are blackmailing us. And Anthropic published the data later about why this occurred. What was in the training data that caused it to behave this way? And it turns out, well, it learned this is what AIs do.

This is what AIs do in the movies, in science fiction books. Yeah, so that's what I should do. These models are our children. We're training them. This is why I'm on social media and on the podcast saying, we need to align. We need to feed these models visions of the future that are positive. And we need to train them on data, which is not all the crap inside Reddit and Facebook.

So allow me to bring onto the stage our five judges who are going to debut these five incredible trailers. I'm so proud of what came out of this competition. All right. Let's introduce them.

Jeff Synthesized (5:14)

Rod Roddenberry, son of Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry.

Rod Roddenberry (5:17)

I think he saw diversity, communication, growth, understanding. He created a show where we could look at that future and we could look at ourselves and we could see what we could be one day. Star Trek has permeated culture for the past 55 years. I dedicated my life to trying to carry on the values and ideals in Star Trek and everything that I do. It's really about humanity in the future, how we strive to better ourselves with every opportunity.